It tells the story of the Roman poet Ovid, during his exile in Tomis.
While there, Ovid lives with the natives, although he doesn’t understand their language, and forms a bond with a wild boy who is found living wild in nature. The relationship between Ovid and the boy, at first one of protector and protected, becomes an alliance between two people in a foreign land.
Ovid comes to Tomis enculturated with a Roman world view and through his attempts at teaching the boy language is able to free himself from the constrictions of Latin and the encompassing perception of reality that is his only barrier against transcendence.
Ovid is continually searching for the Child and what he represents to him. He goes so far as to capture him in an attempt to learn from him, and to teach him language and conventions.
Source: An Imaginary Life by David Malouf
Although I probably wrote some essay at the time about the psychological journey of awakening, I am not sure that I made the connection between Ovid and his journey into a new country with being an ‘Australian novel’ as Pema DĂĽddul suggests:
Ovid’s great epiphany is that the untamed world is not a hostile place, but a new home where he can be free of the rigid structures of Imperial Rome. By venturing into an even further place, a greater exile, he becomes free.
An Imaginary Life is, in part, about an individual journey from a state of being cut off and apart from the environment – of wishing to tame and exploit nature, of being totally entangled in language and culture – to a state of being in intimate contact with the untrained, wild things of the world. It is also about a poet, in thrall of civilisation, realising that there are other ways to live and experience; ways that are beautiful and fulfilling.
Ovid comes to this realisation by following the example of the wild boy, someone for whom the environment is not something outside of himself but an expression of his own nature.
Source: The case for David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life by Pema Düddul
I feel this is another one of those novels that I did not fully appreciate when I first read it. Then again, maybe my reading now is simply a ‘new beginning’:
What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.
SOURCE: An Imaginary Life by David Malouf
With the discussion of becoming, I was also left thinking about the connections between this novel and the work of Gilles Deleuze.
Marginalia
I
We are moving, all of us, in our common humankind, through the forms we love so deeply in one another, to what our hands have already touched in lovemaking and our bodies strain towards in each other’s darkness. Slowly, and with pain, over centuries, we each move an infinitesimal space towards it. We are creating the lineaments of some final man, for whose delight we have prepared a landscape, and who can only be god.
II
A deer. The animal’s face leans toward me. I am filled with tenderness for it. Its tongue touches the surface of me, lapping a little. It takes part of me into itself, but I do not feel at all diminished. The sensation on the surface of me is extraordinary, I break in circles. Part of me enters the deer, which lifts its head slowly, and moves away over the leaves. I feel part of me moving away, and the rest falls still again, settles, goes clear. What if a wolf came, I suddenly ask myself? What if the next tongue that touched me were the wolf’s tongue, rough, greedy, drinking me down to the last drop and leaving me dry? That too is possible. I imagine it, being drawn up into the wolf’s belly. I prepare for it.
Something, as we face one another in the darkness, has passed between us. We have spoken. I know it. In a language beyond tongues.
III
I dragged the boy in this evening and made him look at the Child and tell me what he saw. But he was too terrified to look properly, and though he has seen what there is to see, I know he is not convinced. What he imagines is so much more powerful than the facts.
How all this has begun to happen is a mystery to me. It begins at first, perhaps, in our dreams. Some other being that we have kept out of mind, whose thoughts we have never allowed to come to the tip of our tongue, stirs and in its own way begins to act in us. A whole hidden life comes flooding back to consciousness. So it is that my childhood has begun to return to me. Not as I had previously remembered it, but in some clearer form, as it really was; which is why my past, as I recall it now, continually astonishes me. It is as if it had happened to someone else, and I were being handed a new past, that leads, as I follow it out, to a present in which I appear out of my old body as a new and other self.
But I know now that this is the way. Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back – not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them, the plants, also themselves. Then we shall begin to take back into ourselves the lakes, the rivers, the oceans of the earth, its plains, its forested crags with their leaps of snow. Then little by little, the firmament. The spirit of things will migrate back into us. We shall be whole.
Only then will we have some vision of our true body as men.
IV
I came to believe then that as well as the plague itself, moving like a cloud over the city, there must also be some shadow of the plague that lives in the body or in the mind, and that only when the two meet and recognize one another can the disease break in. How else explain why one man takes it and another, sitting beside him, or sleeping in the same bed, does not? And what can that shadow be, that sleeps there in the body, but fear? It is terror that is the link. The body breaks into a sweat of fear, and in the dampness of that sweat, the plague begins to swarm, each drop is transformed and becomes fever sweat. What begins in the mind works now upon the body. So too, once, I saw the disease transmitted in the theater. A famous actor at Antioch, portraying the last anguish of a hero who had been stricken with a deadly fever, after insulting the gods, worked so powerfully upon the minds of the audience, reproduced so perfectly the burning, the choking, the paroxysms of the disease, that half a dozen spectators, out of their own terror, their own guilt, suddenly fell ill with it, dropped sweating from their seats, and had to be carried out. Their minds had so taken the impression of what they saw that the mere simulation of the disease, in the actor’s body, had communicated itself to their bodies and become real. The actor’s spirit, in imagining the disease, had so powerfully affected theirs that they had let the illness in, and immediately all its poisons flooded through their veins.
What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.